Saturday, June 30, 2012

The Mubarak Trial that Wasn’t

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

June 5, 2012

The June 2 verdict in the trial of former Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak only confirmed what many Egyptian activists feared all along:
The trial, while proving that the former leader was not above the law,
was never going to be about truth and accountability.

There wasn’t much rejoicing in Cairo, even though the former
president was sentenced to life in prison. The trial itself was a
desultory affair, with the judge claiming that prosecutors failed to
present significant evidence tying the former president to attacks by
security forces and Egyptian police that led to around 840 deaths and thousands of injuries during the 2011 uprisings.

Amnesty welcomed the trial of Mubarak and others for their role in
the killing of protesters which began in January 2011. However, the
trial and verdict have left the families of those killed, as well as
those injured in the protests, in the dark about the full truth of what
happened to their loved ones and it failed to deliver full justice.

This feeling was echoed by Egyptian
activists, who felt that the lack of transparency in the trial was all
along an effort to avoid accountability for the long list of human
rights abuses. Some said the verdict emphasized how little has changed
since the Jan. 25 uprising. The lesson for Magdi Abdelhadi, an Egyptian
journalist, was that the “Mubarak regime can not try the Mubarak
regime.”

It could have been different. The trial should have been more open
to the victims and their family members. Instead many family members
were not allowed into the courtroom and on some occasions they were
subjected to police beatings and intimidation. A trial that should have
strengthened the rule of law instead was something that left observers
feeling like the law had been manipulated.

Activists hoped for a trial that would present a chain of command and
specific orders that led to the killings. Real accountability would
have named the political and security officials, many of whom remain in
office, who participated. It would have been a trial that smashed the
decades of impunity that enabled Egyptian leaders to muzzle civil
society and oppress human rights without consequences.

It’s important to remember what has been changed: A president has
been shown that he is not above the rule of law, and free and relatively
fair elections have given the Egyptian people a chance at real
political participation that had long been denied them. There’s no
going back from that.

Furthermore, the protests that followed the verdict suggest that the
current regime may have misread the mood of the populace. The
expectation is that activists would cheer Mubarak being hauled off to
jail and then returned home complacently. That’s not going to happen.
Activists’ work has just begun.

The verdict must be seized as an opportunity to start urgently needed
institutional and legal reforms with a view to ending Egypt’s
entrenched culture of impunity for human rights violations.

Until such reforms are introduced, security officers and others will
continue to see they are still able to escape punishment for the
violations and abuses they commit.